


Smile

by illegible



Category: Spider-Man (Comicverse), Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Revamp, Character Study, Gen, Implied Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-10
Updated: 2014-11-10
Packaged: 2018-02-24 19:26:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2593475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illegible/pseuds/illegible
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He was the kind of person who didn’t trust cameras in anybody else’s hands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Smile

He was the kind of person who didn’t trust cameras in anybody else’s hands. Tall and thin with articulate fingers, the first time Quentin Beck trusted Henry (whatever he was at the time) to film him he’d flashed his teeth. Beck had been wandering through the empty set, considering how to adjust a lighting fixture to something that would make the leading actress look properly radiant where he’d always imagined her coarse. It wasn’t her fault; Elizabeth’s smile reached her eyes. She liked to lean in on conversations like she was giving you all of her attention. It just wasn’t, Beck reflected, all that much. She’d spilled her drinks more than once and it was driving the costume department crazy. Her laugh was loud and obnoxious and her mouth was too wide. Henry seemed to think this was completely ridiculous of course.

“They put her on magazine covers for a reason,” he’d explained, and when he laughed it was full and clean and easy enough that Beck found himself doubting it was genuine. Of course it was. Henry never had to worry about sincerity. Dark hair in a more traditional style, scruffy eyebrows, broad jaw and square frame, he could probably inspire America or break it’s heart if he’d had any inclination toward acting. Brimming with honesty and good intentions. But he was the one who captured moments from the sidelines. Beck cast his smoke and mirrors so people could imagine, for a while, that the world was a series of effects orchestrated to bring them to life when they otherwise might have sunk into the background. Human beings and props weren’t all that different if they were honest with themselves. Just ask the extras.

Henry called his attention, the space between them divided by a camera lens. Beck paused in stride to look back. In a moment they became the audience and the actors at once. There was never any fourth wall to break for people like them, but he wasn’t entirely sure what this was. What the camera made of his bony shoulders, his un-tucked shirts, the hair his cousin was nagging him to cut before people started thinking he was some kind of vagrant... was a mystery.

He thought his own eyes looked cold. When he was younger it hadn’t occurred to him. Beck had made fires so he could watch the recordings back later, played with shadows and tried to decipher the divide between noir and horror. Not a terrible kid, but he supposed he’d never really left his own world to explore others. His last girlfriend (Beck didn’t bother with relationships much in general these days so much as collections of one night stands with an entirely different crowd) had called his eyes pretty. Which was, he reflected, too nice of her. Pale irises, almost blue but edging into their own category that might have been gray and might have suggested violet. Back then his mother wasn’t inclined to let his hair spiral into its current mess but it had always been the same dusty, forgettable brown and his skin was sallow like a sheet of paper. So if he’d been given one dramatic feature it might as well be that.

But however expressive the rest of his face might get, Beck wasn’t sure his eyes ever channeled emotion well. He’d made himself something of an observer in his own life. Put on the spot to explain himself to someone else’s gaze, he found himself becoming a performance he wasn’t entirely sure he liked.


End file.
